Trees not doing good enough... Make better ones!

As we are inside what is known as the Anthropocene (The Age of Man) We have made what might look like a little impact based on what we can see in numbers. On all the land of earth. 90 gigatons of CO2 are expelled from the ocean each year and 120 gigatons of CO2 are expelled from the rest of earth each year but what about humans?  only 9 gigatons are expelled from us each year, why do we make such a difference. The reason for that is nature compensates for itself and has been doing that for years. Humans do not. Nature has even attempted to compensate by taking an extra 5 gigatonnes per year but that still isn't fixing the problem. Now we are emitting extra carbon dioxide and we have been doing that for years

Sea levels are rising faster and faster, some wildlife is moving further up north, rain and snow has increased across the globe, temperatures are increasing, and there are even worse problems coming to us. Sea levels are expected to rise 7-23 inches by the end of the century, hurricanes and storms are going to become stronger, floods and droughts will become more common, diseases such as malaria will spread, and ecosystems will change. Acid rain is also a problem in which the water in the air has carbon dissolved in it to make carbonic acid which then dissociates and releases a H+ ion.

CO2 (carbon dioxide) + H2O (water) → H2CO3 (carbonic acid)

H2CO3 (carbonic acid) → H (hydrogen +) + HCO3 (hydrogen carbonate - )

All of this is due to the extra amount of carbon dioxide we humans are pumping out. Finally you may ask, How can we fix this? If nature cant fix our problems we will have to do it ourselves. Trees are not powerful enough to take all of the oxygen that we put out but don't worry, Klaus Lackner built better ones. He is the director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia University and he has created artificial trees. These trees are 1000x more powerful per leaf when compared to regular trees and they don't need any sunlight to work. They work by having a resin of sodium carbonate on them which stores the carbon in the form of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda). which can be rinsed off using water vapor.

Na2CO3 (sodium carbonate) + CO2 (carbon dioxide) + H2O (water) → 2 NaHCO3 (baking soda)

A regular tree can absorb up to a tonne of carbon dioxide by the time it is 40 years old. This tree can do that in one day. Ten million of these trees would remove 10% of our global emissions PER YEAR. A job which would take ten billion trees to do per year. These trees seem to be extremely efficient and they would take the form of a pine tree.

Do you think that the resin on the trees will eventually wear off or will it last longer then we need to. Will we be needing to replace trees or add the resin again to each tree?

Do you believe that the cost for each tree will be worth what we get out of it? If the resin or material is expensive should we still buy it or wait for a cheaper alternative?

(Sources will be fixed)

Carbon Diagram

Design by Robert Simmon June 16, 2011. In article "The carbon cycle" by Holli Riebeek at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/CarbonCycle/

Prototype image

Photo by Justin Strauss/thecityatlas.org

Sucking CO2 From the Skies with Artificial Trees BBC future

By Gaia Vince, 4 October 2012, http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20121004-fake-trees-to-clean-the-skies

The Carbon Cycle

By Holli Riebeek, June 16 2011, http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/CarbonCycle/

Tree Facts

By NC state univercity, http://www.ncsu.edu/project/treesofstrength/treefact.htm

Carbon Capture Technologies that Could Help Fight Climate Change

Earth Island Journal, BY Richard Schiffman, January 29 

2013, http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/elist/eListRead/carbon_capture_technologies_that_could_help_fight_climate_change/